Review of Australian Fiction, Volume 5, Issue 2

by Penni Russon

  Volume 5: Issue 2

  “A Necessary Labour” Copyright © 2013 by Penni Russon, and “Lost and Found” Copyright © 2013 by Kirstyn McDermott

  Imprint

  Published by Review of Australian Fiction

  “A Necessary Labour” Copyright © 2013 by Penni Russon

  “Lost and Found” Copyright © 2013 by Kirstyn McDermott

  www.reviewofaustralianfiction.com

  www.booki.sh

  * * *

  This project has received financial assistance from the Queensland Government through Arts Queensland.

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  And support from the Queensland Writers' Centre

  Editorial

  Kate Eltham

  I discovered Penni Russon’s organic, supple prose when I read her novel Only Ever Always (2011) as a judge of the Aurealis Awards in 2011. Her words were like music, flowing around and over pages, lapping at the edges of the dream world she created in that story. That was a novel about childhood and dreams and language, and a little about death, but mostly about life. And like her first trilogy—Undine (2004), Breathe (2005), and Drift (2007)—it loops around and folds back on itself and somehow manages to land exactly where it ought. Her blog Eglantine’s Cake is a scroll of kōans—sometimes poetry, sometimes prose—that question all these things.

  Russon’s story in this issue of the Review of Australian Fiction, “A Necessary Labour”, is also a little about death, but mostly about life; but you could also say it is about being lost and found, and about choosing to make a life wherever you wash ashore.

  I think you will enjoy it.

  I have paired Penni with another Melbourne writer whose prose I admire, Kirstyn McDermott. Kirstyn’s first novel Madigan Mine was published by Picador in 2010, and recently followed by Perfections (2012). Her short fiction has won Aurealis Awards and Ditmar Awards, and has been included in many of The Year’s Best anthologies that cover fantasy, science fiction and horror. Kirstyn also publishes The Writer and the Critic, a monthly podcast with Ian Mond discussing books and literature.

  The true power of Kirstyn’s writing, of course, is voice. Her characters spring off the page, fully formed, and insinuate themselves in the soft folds of your brain, and lie there, whispering, long after you’ve finished reading. In her RAF story, “Lost and Found”, Ghost is the shy and reticent heroine who is nonetheless heroic, and in my brain she whispers still.

  Both these stories are about life’s flotsam, but also about what happens to it when it is stranded above the tide line.

  Enjoy.

  Kate Eltham

  Director, Brisbane Writers’ Festival

  @kate_eltham

  A Necessary Labour

  Penni Russon

  The bath water is the colour of weak tea. The tub is deep and wide, usually too big to fill, especially when there is nobody home to share it. But there has been rain in the last weeks, rain like there used to be when I was a kid, soaking, wet rain that lasts a whole day. The colours dancing on the BOM satellite show that there is more on the way, sheeting across the city towards the mountains. The tank is brimming, set to overflow. We are paupers from a fairy tale suddenly rich beyond our dreams, wealth that falls from the sky, so much we can’t possibly hope to catch it all.

  My feet are numb with cold, as I step in to the water pain scalds me. I grit my teeth and I lower myself, submerging my hips, my squared-off stomach, my triangular breasts, the sharp angles of my body.

  The heat penetrates my aching muscles. I lie back to soak away the clay soil. I have been yanking out the weeds: the cooch, the flowering oxalis, the pungent onion weed, the wiry boneseed. I am aware that I am only scraping them off the surface. Deep under the ground are thick sinews of living roots. I think the weeds might be stronger than me, stronger than my will to eradicate them.

  But being in the garden is pleasant, despite the frigid air, better than being shut inside the dark house. The wattles are bursting with gold and the hardenbergia is soft with purple flowers. The jonquils are out already, little nodding winter suns. (They seem to bloom earlier every year, but perhaps it is time itself that slips by faster.) I remember when I planted them a few autumns ago, holding those bulbs in my hand, wizened and papery, but fertile. Secretive and strong and female in their shape, like an ovary. Sometimes when I am digging in the garden in late summer or early autumn I will come across one (dry, shriveled), and I bury it again and dig somewhere else.

  The ♀ body has always been my aesthetic, but since Sage came into my life I have been made a student of the male form as well. He was still in nappies when his mother and I met and I would take him in the mornings while she slept. I fed him oat porridge and warm milk. Most mornings halfway through the meal he would start to frown and grunt in his high chair, looking at me with intense concentration and then, finally, his face would relax. I would change him then, laying him out on the floor and stripping him down, moving his penis side to side then pushing it gently back to wipe him down the seam of his scrotum, in that place where the human body looks stitched together on both sexes. Of course I have encountered penises before, but never under so pleasant a circumstance as when it was covered in innocuous vegetable baby shit. I came to appreciate not so much the penis, which I cannot help feeling contempt for—to think so much power has been ascribed to such a foolish wriggly appendage—but the whole package of the scrotum and the curious hidden puzzle of the testicles: doubles wrapped as a single soft dumpling.

  And to be fair, the jonquil bulb is also scrotum-like in its fertility, the same pendulous shape, masculine, adult, with its sprouting of wiry hairs. Male bodies make life too, who knows that better than a barren lesbian?

  Not that I wanted a baby. Gabi does, a brother or a sister for Sage. Knock me up, Mish, she whispers in bed before we make love. She longs for her body to be round again, for her breasts to swell with milk. She tries to describe the quickening to me, or with shining eyes she tells me about the moment that she felt Sage’s burning head crown and then pop through and the rest of his body slither out. I can picture it, can see Gabi in her hippie birthing pool, her radiant face, I can imagine a freshly emerged Sage, pink with life, his little legs curled up question marks. But I can’t feel it. No part of my body seems built for it though all the equipment is there. Once she suggested we get pregnant together and raise our babies as twins. I laughed it off—she’s ten years younger than I am, she’s the picture of health and fertility with her round hips and layer of exquisite, opulent fat. My body is concave and bitter with all the old poisons. Nothing could survive in my shriveled husk.

  * * *

  Dear Amy, I write in my head. I long ago gave up the habit of pretending that one day I would send her the letters I compose. And once Gabi found a letter I was writing to Amy and came the closest she ever has to leaving me.

  ‘But we were never even lovers!’

  ‘Fuck, Mish, that‘s worse. How am I supposed to compete with that?’

  I burnt the letter. I burnt all the letters. I sat throwing them one by one into the stone fireplace as Gabi cried in our bedroom.

  ‘You couldn’t just chuck them in the bin?’ she shouted down the hall. ‘The great unrequited love.’

  She was right. There was deep tormented pleasure in watching all those wasted words catch alight, folding in to touch themselves or arching back, coming alive in the flames, dancing themselves into ashes: the exquisite grief of the irretrievable.

  But I couldn’t give her up completely, my last vice, my most addictive drug. On my walks, in the garden, doing housework, driving to the community centre where I work—my inner monolog
ue was all directed at her, one long love letter that never ended.

  Writing this way to Amy is the closest thing I’ve ever had to prayer.

  Dear Amy. I’m painting again. Not with paint, not yet. But I am feeling out a picture in my head, I can see the particular mix of colours: the clay that runs on the side of the dirt road when it rains here, the charcoal of burned trees, the unlikely new green, the pale rising mist, the dazzle of the long sun. I’ve started to clean out the shed, even though the light is wrong. But I have to make a space for myself, Ames. I have to stop making excuses, finding reasons not to paint.

  * * *

  Two weeks ago I was in the supermarket with Sage and I bumped into Amy’s sister, Ruth, standing near the registers, flicking through a magazine. The magazine was open to a photograph of the new Prime Minister, glammed up and glossy under the headline: I Made My Choices. Emanating from Ruth, I could almost smell their family smell: high tones of fabric softener and something sweet and cheap and alcoholic, like Fruity Lexia, their clean suburban bungalow with its endless supply of ice-cream and shop-bought biscuits, of guest towels and disappointment.

  ‘Ruth, isn’t it?’ I said. ‘Ruth Allingham?’

  A polite, reserved smile. ‘I used to be.’

  ‘Missy,’ I said, also using my past name, shedding years of my life, shedding Gabi, so that Sage at my elbow in his oversized jumper became a stranger’s child, hardly anything to do with me at all. I couldn’t trust myself to say Amy’s name aloud—though I longed to—so I added, ‘We were at school together.’

  Wariness shifted in Ruth, going from some subterranean part of her to the surface of her face. ‘Of course. Missy. Hi. Gosh, it’s been so long.’

  ‘Are you living round here?’ I asked.

  ‘Up on the mountain, Kinglake West. We’ve been in the house, oh, twelve years now.’

  ‘We’re in Toolangi. We just moved in.’

  ‘Is this your boy?’ Ruth asked me.

  This stranger, this halfling, this found thing? ‘Oh, sorry, this is Sage. Sage this is Ruth.’ I breathed. ‘Amy’s sister. Remember I told you about Amy?’

  Sage shook his head.

  ‘Oh, well. I did. Lots of times.’

  ‘Hi, Sage,’ Ruth said.

  Sage eyed Ruth’s trolley, piled high with chips, soft drinks, refrigerated dips and boxes of crackers.

  Ruth said, ‘We’re having a party. My fortieth.’

  I screwed up my face. ‘Shit we’re old.’

  ‘You’re a few years younger than me, though.’

  ‘I started school late,’ I said. Little for my age, couldn’t sit, couldn’t read, unschooled in the hippie house till the authorities turned up one time too many. ‘I’ll be forty next September.’

  ‘What do you think?’ I asked, nodding towards the magazine. Sage tugged my sleeve.

  ‘She looks nice,’ Ruth said. ‘Not so harsh. Pretty, even.’

  I laughed. ‘I meant politically. First woman PM. Big deal, hey?’

  ‘I’d like her better if she was a mother,’ Ruth said and I saw the same unyielding Ruth. I always thought she might become a nun.

  ‘At least she’s a daughter,’ I said. ‘That’s something. Do you have kids, Ruth?’

  ‘Five,’ Ruth said, embarrassed, proud. ‘Gemma, my oldest, is thirteen and Mahalia, the youngest, is five months. Then there’s the boys: Ryder, Jayden and Tai. Jayden’s about your age,’ she added to Sage. ‘Eight?’

  ‘Ten,’ murmured Sage.

  ‘That’s great,’ I smiled. ‘I always imagined you with a brood.’

  It touched me, Amy, honestly, to see how Ruth had made herself a family.

  ‘Can we go now?’ Sage asked, yanking hard at my arm.

  There was sadness at the corners of her which I thought was still to do with back then, with fucked up motherlove and the crappy competition your mum set up between you, which was always worse for Ruth than for you, because—admit this much at least—you had me. But of course that’s ancient history, a lifetime of sadnesses ago, and it turns out she has plenty more to be sad about.

  And so do I.

  My heart was hammering as I followed Sage down the aisles. I couldn’t let Ruth leave. I rushed through the register and grabbed her, babbling nonsense. ‘It’s been so long… so much has changed. I’ve changed…’ A mobile number? Could I at least pass on mine? But Amy. Oh, Amy.

  Ruth was shaking her head. ‘No, Missy. Oh no. No.’ I thought she was blocking me, protecting Amy. A flare of white anger at the back of my brain, Ruth was still jealous after all these years. But: ‘I’m sorry, Missy,’ Ruth said. ‘I thought you knew.’

  So you were gone then. In-the-real-world gone, even before I burnt the letters. Four years ago, four whole years of no you. Dying giving birth to a daughter like some fucked up mythological creature, or a mother in an old fashioned novel, some crazy Freudian bullshit.

  ‘Right,’ I said to Ruth, nodding as if I were a secretary taking a message for someone who was out of the building. ‘Right. Thank you for letting me know.’ I patted her arm. ‘Happy birthday,’ I said. I made it all the way round the supermarket. I answered all the questions correctly—yes, I have my own bags, they’re jerusalem artichokes, no I don’t have a customer reward card—and I punched my numbers into the credit card machine.

  * * *

  It’s not like Sage had never seen me lose it in public. As I howled in the carpark, he fished through the plastic bags and found the box of barbecue shapes his mum would never have let him buy. He scoffed them by the handful, sitting on the curb, waiting for me to stop pulling my hair and wailing.

  ‘Is your mum all right?” a short, elderly woman asked Sage, as if I were some kind of deranged, unmuzzled dog. Her husband, also short, was unable to mask his disapproval.

  ‘She’s not my mum,’ Sage said.

  Under their scrutiny the tears dried up, acid in my burning eyes. ‘I just had some bad news,’ I told them primly. It’s also not like I wasn’t used to strangers standing over me, watching me come apart in public. The woman nodded, her frownlines deepening. She propelled her tiny husband almost imperceptibly, as if she’d long perfected the art of making it seem like he was in the lead and she was following.

  * * *

  Guilty I top up the hot water. Outside the rain has already started, a steady drumming on the tin roof. The guilt is needless, an old boring habit, nothing more.

  * * *

  The day I saw Ruth at the supermarket, Gabi had come in as I was putting the groceries away, the deadening thud of cereal boxes on the shelves, the tedious art of balancing one tin on another.

  She kissed Sage’s forehead. ‘Phew, what’s that smell? What have you been eating?’

  ‘Shapes.’ His voice rising he added, ‘Mish bought them.’

  ‘Jeez, Mish. Are you serious?’

  I quietly shut the kitchen cupboard door. I turned to Sage and said, ‘Fuck. You.’ I walked out the side door into the yard.

  Gabi found me sitting in the car, my hands holding the steering wheel, but I didn’t have the keys, or anywhere else to go.

  ‘Sage says someone’s sister died?’ she said, slipping into the passenger seat.

  I didn’t look at her. I couldn’t.

  ‘Are you going to talk to me?’

  I clenched the wheel.

  ‘You’re scaring me. Who died? Someone I know?’

  I twisted in the seat, reaching over to bury my head in her lap, holding her skirt to my face with both hands. It wasn’t the shocked animal howling I’d performed in the carpark but a necessary labour: an emptying of all things. In her skirt were the powerful smells of our joined selves, the life we lead together, a life I strained against every day, a life of second bests, of didn’t haves. And she held me, and she let me cry, and she said one word, the word of love, the word of loss, the word of the world of the past in which my twilight self always half dwelled: Amy.

  * * *

  Here in the bath, looking d
own at the muscles and skin and bone that constitute my stomach, I am entertaining a foolish fantasy. Foolish because I am the last woman on earth Marcus would willingly give his sperm to. And even if by some convoluted means I manage to secure some (I imagine furtive midnight incursions or seducing him in a seedy straight bar wearing a blonde wig), and even if I surpass my own withered biology to make a half-sibling for Amy’s little girl, my child would still have no blood relation to Amy. It wouldn’t be like having Amy’s child, I tell myself. Now I know that Amy is not busy living her life somewhere, but is instead a ghost hovering in the atmosphere, I can feel her here, eavesdropping on every idiotic thought and desire, her ginger-auburn hair tucked behind one ear, her pale eyelashes lowered, giving nothing away. It wouldn’t in any way bring you back. And yet for once I am thinking of that space, yawning, vacant, inside my body.

  The scars run up and down my arms. I hardly notice them these days, though Sage has asked me about them lately, what they are. ‘Life lessons,’ I told him and ignored his rolling eyes. He cannot remember a time without me, and yet, by some deep instinct, he knows how extraneous I am.

  ‘Track marks,’ Amy said, the time she came to visit me at the psych hospital, running her fingers over them.

  ‘Road maps,’ I said back, young, bitter, proud, even, of how far I could push myself.

  ‘But they just take you to the lost places.’ It was the last time I saw her. If I’d known it would be the last time, I would have kissed her mouth. Just once. Just a taste.

  I plunge my head under the bath water. I stay under as long as I can, hoarding the stale air in my lungs until some primordial imperative propels me upwards and I resurface, gasping. I can’t stay down long enough. I never could, always hauled back to the surface by some primal imperative.